Revenge of the Fiji Mermaid

Misc.

"Sorry, I got slightly lost there when you started talking about wormholes and biscuits – who did you say you were again?" Dorothea Ames, new, replacement headmistress at Coal Hill Academy, asked the puzzling, bow-tie wearing man in front of her.

"Oh, yes, I do tend to get carried away when it comes to quantum physics and… baking. We're pest control. Exterminators," he produced a sheet of blank paper, "Here because we heard about your rat problem."

"I wasn't aware we have a rat problem," Dorothea said politely, though she was smiling, and she knew he was trying to trick her with a wallet of psychic paper. Plus, she always took care to review the CCTV tapes from the night before; it was remarkable how much happened at the school during the night when it was supposed to be closed, "I haven't seen many rats."

"It's not an issue with the amount of rats, it's an issue with the rats themselves," he said. The CCTV and the Governors had also informed Dorothea that the Doctor's police box had been seen in one of the storage cupboards. "Just call me the Doctor," he said. They were in the entrance hall of Coal Hill, students milling about, generally ignoring her.

"Ah, yes," she said smoothly, "That rat problem." This rat problem, whatever it was, wasn't anything to do with the Governors. Therefore, she decided that the Doctor could run around and do what he liked. He wasn't all that much of a worry, really, just an inconvenience. Letting him think he had fooled her into believing he was a representative of some pest control company would just make him unsuspicious of the school's authority figures. Let the Doctor have his fun, Dorothea thought to herself.

"We're going to need you to section off the entire sports hall," he said curtly, "We have a great deal of sensitive equipment and poisons."

"Anything if it will help with the rat problem," she said, "I'll let the PE staff know to take the children outside for PE today." The Doctor cast a glance over his shoulder at the door, where the tropical storm from the night before was still raging quite ferociously. A girl's umbrella flew out of her hands and smacked a Year Seven in the face.

"It's a good thing the weather is holding up, then," he said.

"Yes," Dorothea agreed, "If you'll excuse me, I have places I need to be, Doctor…"

"Just a second," he said, and then he fumbled with the inside pocket of his tweed jacket while the short, blonde girl at his side who looked so young she could easily be a pupil there as well rolled her eyes, "What do you know about this boy?" He brandished a crumpled missing poster at her.

"Josh Hart?" she asked, "Good achiever, could have done better in his mock exams results, his mother hosts a book club twice a month, nothing unusual. It's a tragedy he's disappeared. Teenagers are often going missing, though, I'm sure Josh will turn up."

"He's been gone for a week already."

"And the Governors are very sorry about that, but the school have liaised with the parents and the police, there's little else for us to do. Now, I really need to be on my way to check on the new football coach after there was a little incident with the last one…"

"Yes, yes…" he said, seeming disappointed, "But – don't you be coming in the sports hall either, Miss…?"

"Ames," she answered, beginning to walk off, "And I wouldn't dream of it." The Doctor smiled as she disappeared away, telling kids to tuck their shirts in as she went.

"What do you think, eh?" Eleven nudged Jenny with his elbow. Jenny, though, had grown distracted by something in front of them.

"I don't think she believes we're exterminators, that's what," Jenny said, "Look, dad." She pointed out what she had been drawn towards; a large, wooden board, much taller than the Doctor, and covered in names. Jenny had seen a name which was much too familiar sitting on the thing, which was, according to the words above it, the Coal Hill School Roll of Honours Board. "Oswald, C," Jenny read off it, crossing her arms.

"She's not gone," he reminded her.

"I know that, obviously, it's just… do you think her grave is nearby?"

"What do you want to visit her grave for?"

"I want to see what it says on it," she said, "What if she picked a quote, or something, pre-emptively? I want to know what it is."

"Just ask her," he said, "Look above it, Pink, R.D."

"I'm gonna send her a picture of it," Jenny said, getting her phone out. Eleven just let her, wandering down the board to look at all the other names. He had known a great deal of people who had Coal Hill School in its various iterations as their haunts, and found a name which struck as much a chord with him as Clara's name did with his daughter, right near the beginning.

"Would you look at this; Foreman, S," he said. Jenny, texting, frowned. The kids around them, all soaked and coming in from the hurricane outside, didn't pay the two weirdos milling about any notice whatsoever. Typical humans, always wanting to ignore things that were out of place.

"Who's that?"

"My granddaughter, Susan," he said, "Your… erm… I'm not sure… Niece?"

"You have a granddaughter?" Jenny asked seriously, putting her phone away. She had presumably finished bothering her girlfriend with the fact her name featured on a list of the dead.

"Not for a long time, hundreds of years. Nobody anymore. Just the two of us," he said, then mused, "I wonder if the two of you would have been friends…" Jenny was none too surprised she didn't know about this Susan character. There was an enormous amount she didn't know about her father, and about the Time Lords. She wondered if she would ever know everything about him. "They should put Clara's name on the billboard twice after you shot her in the face earlier." Jenny scowled as he began to lead them away towards the sports hall.

"I've been thinking I might get a stick."

"A stick? Do to what with?"

"Hit people."

"Charming."

"Some sort of extendable one. A staff. And I can lean on it, and look like the wise old master of some sort of lost fighting art," Jenny explained, "Then I'll beat them up."

"I don't like the thought of you going around and beating people up."

"I don't mean in a rampage-y way. Like, when Jack starts saying things, I could just clout him."

"I very much love the thought of you going around and beating people up – so long as they're Captain Jack," he changed his tact immediately, "Where is Jack, anyway? I haven't seen him for days." The two of them pushed through the crowds of kids, though there weren't all that many. Probably people were skiving because of the weather.

"How should I know? He's swapped rooms with Donna to avoid me."

"That's immature of him."

"Yeah, well, it doesn't matter. It's not like I spend much time in my room anyway," she said, opening the doors into the sports hall.

"What do you mean, pest control?" Quill asked Dorothea coldly, "Pest control why? I know the children can be dreadful sometimes but I'm not sure they need eradicating." But Dorothea Ames did not explain herself as she told Quill this news of the sports hall's closure that morning, cornering her on her way to her Year 9 Physics lesson, Charlie and company still following her like a pack of lost dogs.

"For the rat problem, Quill," Dorothea said like this should mean something to her. Annoyingly enough, it did; Quill knew exactly what she was talking about, exactly why she was mentioning it in front of the little group of 'crime fighters' in their vicinity, and exactly who these 'unusually-dressed exterminators' were. She rolled her eyes.

"Good lord…" then added sharply, "I'll be sure to let the students know they should skip their PE lessons to avoid going out in this storm."

"Wonderful," said Dorothea, like she was choosing to ignore the last part of Quill's sentence. She probably was. In any case, she took her leave, and Quill turned her bored, long-suffering eyes on the others. Except, they weren't there. They had just taken off, almost as soon as Dorothea had turned her back. Typical, thought Quill. But oh well. At least it meant she wouldn't have to look at them anymore. She turned her attention for the moment back to scaring the life out of some fourteen-year-olds.

"I don't get it, what's the big deal about pest control? And the school having rats?" Ram Singh questioned as Charlie led them all very swiftly away from Quill and Ames.

"It's not pest control, it's the Doctor," Matteusz explained.

"The Doctor? He's come back?" April MacLean asked.

"Who was the Doctor again?" Tanya Adeola interrupted, all of them walking together through the halls as a big group, most of them soaking wet from the horrible rain. Except April and Ram, who had come in Ram's car, which annoyed the rest of the group somewhat, because why couldn't Ram have given them all a lift? Quill could have hung out in the boot, or something.

"He saved us from the Shadow Kin," April reminded her, "Gave Ram his new leg – he was in that weird box-thing."

"He brought Quill and I to Earth, remember?" Charlie said.

"Oh, him," Tanya realised.

"We ran into him last night, when Matteusz made us look for ghosts, but it wasn't a ghost. It was some kind of robot," Charlie explained.

"Like that robot Quill snogged?" Ram asked, amused. Charlie frowned.

"I don't think so."

"It looked like Miss Oswald," Matteusz began, "You know, the-"

"Incredibly fit English teacher?" Ram suggested. April elbowed him. "What? She was incredibly fit." The conversation was cut off when Charlie pushed open the doors of the sports hall first, and what they were faced with stunned them all to silence.

"Don't you know what quarantine tape looks like?" the blonde girl from the night before, this Jenny, this daughter of the Doctor, demanded, pointing a revolver at them. They all shrieked and jumped as she brandished it, and then she realised with some surprise what she was holding, "Oh, sorry – she's not loaded. You're the boys from yesterday. Where did that severe woman go?"

"Quill's got a lesson on," said Charlie, unnerved by the gun. The girl was sitting on a fold out chair, but she had the chair the wrong way around, her legs around the back of it, and was leaning very awkwardly over it to do something on a futuristic laptop sitting on a different chair by her side. But the girl wasn't the most interesting thing in the room by far, even if Ram was staring at her a little bit; the most interesting thing was what was behind her.

"I thought you said the Doctor had a 'box-thing?'" Tanya asked April. The girl looked up from her computer again, the gun on a fold out table by her side. It was a quite a set up with gadgets and wires, but no Doctor. Just that enormous silver thing, shining like a mirror, sitting right there in the middle of the room. Jenny glanced from the UFO to the quintet

"He does, but it's not here, this is mine," Jenny explained, "We got rid of his because it's rubbish."

"Oi!" a male voice shouted from one of the changing rooms sticking off the edge of the sports hall, now home to a massive, glistening spaceship, apparently. And then a man stuck his head out of the door, a man much younger than the one they had been expecting – all of them save Charlie and Matteusz – and addressed the girl angrily, "That's part of your heritage."

"My dead heritage," she pointed out, amused. He barely even registered the group of students, just vanished again, and the girl looked at them all, "I'm confused. Who are you all? Did we get to do introductions properly yesterday? I was a bit distracted because I shot my girlfriend in the face. But I rang her up afterwards and she forgave me, she thought it was funny." She pointed at Charlie, "You're the prince of the Rhodia who has that woman as your slave, right?"

"She's not my-"

"She is a bit, mate," Ram said, then to the girl, "Yeah, that's him."

"I've got it. You're a gang of ragtag, alien-fighting teenagers, aren't you?" she said knowingly, "We know another one of those. They've got superpowers now, apparently. But not in this universe. It happens all the time, the people the Doctor leaves behind go and become 'defenders of the Earth.' That's what he usually calls them."

"I suppose that's a pretty fitting description…" Tanya said.

"Well," she began, getting up off her chair, leaving her gun behind, "Why don't we all do proper introductions now we're not chasing a stray spoonhead that got lost because my father doesn't know how to do his job properly? I'm Jenny, Jenny Young. But I have a lot of names. It's been 'Harkness' for months, but I don't fancy clinging onto my ex-husband's name anymore, not when Major Young recently got her name cleared for committing genocide. And currently searching through the toilets in the girls' changing room is my dad, the Doctor."

"The Doctor… has a daughter?" April asked.

"Yep, home-grown in a machine using his very own tissue samples over two-hundred years ago," she said, "But, enough about that – who are all you? And what's your name, prince-boy?"

"Charlie," Charlie answered.

"And I'm Ram," Ram said, getting his name in quickly.

"April," said April.

"Tanya," said Tanya.

"Matteusz," said Matteusz, but he had his eyes narrowed at this Jenny, "What do you keep meaning, you 'shot your girlfriend?'"

"I thought I explained? We're from another universe. We call our universe the Alphaverse, and yours the Betaverse. Your Clara Oswald didn't die. Well, she did die, but she was brought back, by, um, ours. Not ours, feels weird saying… Beta Clara didn't die. Alpha Clara brought her back. And then she died again, and that was kind of my fault. You really should expect someone to get bitten by a vampire when you go to Whitby in the 1890s…"

"Vampire!?" exclaimed Ram, April and Tanya.

"But a nice vampire. She lives in Yorkshire now."

"Eurgh," said Ram.

"I know," Jenny sighed, "It's pretty bleak. But she's… fine, really. She's my girlfriend. She knitted me this scarf the other day, it's the best thing I've ever seen in my entire life," she indicated a woollen scarf around her neck.

"And she's your stepmother," the Doctor returned to the room wearing some very long gloves which were generally used for artificially inseminating cows. Or worse, giving them manual bowel evacuations. They went all the way up to his shoulders. He was carrying a plunger, as well.

"Alright, she's not my stepmother, it just happens that you married the other one," Jenny said, "Don't bother the alien-kids with that, it's just confusing. It even confuses me."

"I'm a real exterminator with this plunger," he said, brandishing it at her, though he was stood quite a distance away, "Do you get it? Exterminator?" She said nothing. "Like a Dalek."

"Oh," she realised, "It's not very funny."

"You're married to the same person…?" Ram asked, "Isn't that a bit… wrong?" They both paused, and thought, but neither of them said anything until this young Doctor changed the subject.

"Jenny, I need your help with something."

"With what…?" she asked suspiciously.

"That thing in the toilet, it's wedged right in there, and it's a wriggler. I need you to come and get it with your little hands."

"You want me to stick my broken thumb down a toilet?" she asked.

"Well the plunger isn't getting it, and I need to get it out. I'd rather not disassemble the whole toilet, the last time I did that… it doesn't bear thinking about. I always get into trouble when I mess around too much with plumbing. Unless any of you have small, girly hands and want to volunteer?" he asked the teenagers, and April and Tanya very tactfully hid their hands behind their backs.

"Fine, but if anything happens to my thumb, you're telling Martha it was all your fault. Just like when my thumb got broken in the first place," she said, taking off her coat carefully, and that scarf she was so proud of, presumably so she didn't get gross toilet water all over herself. They all saw the fresh scars running down the knuckle of her thumb now, yellow and bruising and still slightly pink along the jagged edge.

"Jenny!" the Doctor exclaimed, pointing at her arm. There was, the group noticed, a very neat bandage wrapped around it, "What happened to your arm!?"

"Nothing!" she said. He just stared at her. "Alright, fine, a mafioso shot me when I was in that car chase the other day. It's just a flesh wound! Do not tell Martha or she'll kill me." Tanya wondered who this Martha they kept citing was, who sounded very threatening if she ever got whiff of an injury.

When Jenny followed the Doctor into the changing rooms, the teens all followed as well, Jenny taking a fresh pair of those huge gloves from her father to put on. Whatever it was they were after, it certainly was a wriggler. Ram could see it over Jenny's shoulders as she went to kneel down in front of the loo, a big mass writhing around and splashing water out.

"What is it?" Tanya asked.

"Not sure. Something with the same acute energy traces as that rat-pigeon," the Doctor explained, then he looked at Tanya again, "How old are you? Are you in sixth form? None of you are wearing uniforms, so you all must be."

"I'm fourteen," she answered quietly.

"Tanya's a genius," April said, smiling, like she was a little proud. This comforted Tanya.

"My sister-in-law is a genius," the Doctor said, "She's the smartest human being who's ever lived."

"What is her IQ?" Matteusz asked.

"Three-fifty-two," Jenny answered, then she stuck her non-broken hand into the toilet to grab whatever it was that was stuck down there, alive. "It's a good thing I'm so much stronger than you, isn't it?" She was certainly strong enough to free whatever it was that was stuck in there, that was for sure, because she pulled it right out after just a few seconds.

And that was where things got weird.

Whatever it was, it yowled, it shrieked, it made hissing noises, and it went to savage her, and she shrieked right back and practically dropped it as furry, wet, dirty fingers extended and went straight for her face.

"Not my eyes! These eyes are new!" she exclaimed.

Ram was the one who acted, faster than the Doctor, who didn't know what to do that didn't involve possibly killing the creature. It would undoubtedly try to maim anybody who went near it. So he grabbed it round its half-smooth, half-hairy, all disgusting belly and lobbed it straight at the tiled wall of the changing rooms. It splatted there, all wet and clumpy; he had bashed its brains out. He had heard the crunch of its skull splitting apart and releasing curdled brain matter onto the tiles.

"Ew…" said April.

"What is that? I got it on my hand – it's not toxic, is it?"

"I don't know," the Doctor said, unfazed, going to see what it was. It slid, dead and slimy, down the wall, leaving a trail of bloody pulp behind it. He knelt down, squinted, Jenny still shocked. "Kids your age shouldn't be seeing things like that."

"We've seen worse-"

"I had my leg ripped off-"

"Should've seen the dragon-"

"Those Lankin vines-"

"Quill on the toilet," Charlie finished. They all looked at him.

"You've seen Quill on the toilet?" April asked in horror.

"Not on purpose!" he protested, "I could have gouged my eyes out."

"Don't say that, I've had my eyes gouged out," Jenny interrupted, "It was horrible. It was even worse when they were growing back."

"Well, I personally worry about what kind of an education the five of you are getting here with people dying all over the place," the Doctor said, "These are very important qualifications you're sitting right now. Let's do a quiz: have any of you ever heard of the Fiji Mermaid?"

"It was a hoax," Tanya said.

"Correct," he said, "I'd give you a biscuit, but I don't have any. Very famous hoax, man took half of a monkey and sewed it onto half of a fish and said it was a mermaid – I'm quite sure it's in a museum now, and definitely fake. I've been and analysed it. But this…" he picked it off the wall with his still-gloved hand, "it was definitely alive a minute ago."

And that was exactly what it was, just how he had described this 'Fiji Mermaid.' It had the top half of a monkey, and the bottom half of a fish, scales and fur and human-esque face and flippers and all. Even gills on the monkey portion of it.

"Isn't it an alien?" Ram asked.

"No! What kind of alien looks like this? No, no. This is much more sinister than just a lost alien, and it's bigger than that rat-pigeon from yesterday," he said, "I wonder where the monkey came from. Not an alien planet, though. This is more Humpty Dumpty than ET, taking things apart and putting them back together again."

"There was a break-in at London zoo recently?" April suggested.

"Interesting…" and then he dropped the thing right on the floor at his feet. "Do any of you know a boy called Josh Hart?" Jenny sighed and stood up.

"Why do you keep asking everybody about that? He's a teenager, they're always going missing."

"Especially here," Tanya said, "Way more people die and go missing at Coal Hill than at other schools."

"He's in Year 11," April said, "Josh Hart. He plays the violin, he asked me for help with his music exam a few months ago."

"You play the violin?" Jenny asked.

"She plays everything," Ram said.

"I play the fiddle," she said, "And the harp. Or, I used to, haven't really tried it out since I broke my thumb. This sociopath got me to play the fiddle all the time in her speakeasy, way back in the 1930s."

"Yes, anyway – don't you all have a lesson you should be in?" the Doctor questioned, "We have to get to trying to analyse the energy signatures of these weird animals, see if we can't find out if there's any more of them and how they came to be. But I'd appreciate if you could put up this black-and-yellow tape on your way out," he produced a roll of it, "Possibly a quarantine sign? Don't want anybody else walking in here and seeing that massive spaceship, do we?"